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This paper investigates how non-industrial agrarian traditions and practices are reworked and recontextualized in a contemporary context. Explorative in its nature, the paper uses in depth interviews with practitioners in eastern Sweden, several of whom are engaged in work to keep practices of the past alive, to discuss how the concept of revitalization can bear on sustainability. Traditional practices are revived as an alternative to industrialized agriculture, and as having a bearing on resilient cultivation systems as well as social relations. They are seen as means of increasing food security and reversing the negative biodiversity development caused by increased monoculture. We understand tradition as a process of negotiation and adaptation to the present, where revivals to some extent necessarily change the traditions that they attempt to revive. Tradition is thus a dynamic concept, always made in the present, never fixed but constantly evolving. In the challenges created by climate change and environmental degradation, it is increasingly voiced that true sustainability requires a transformation of the cultural system. In many cases, people are turning to tradition for sustainable alternatives to industrialized ways of life and to protect a diversity threatened by a dominant and unsustainable lifestyle.

This article investigates how resources that are perceived as common are turned into property through different interventions of extractivism, and how this provokes counter-activism from groups and actors who see their rights and living conditions threatened by the practices of extraction. The article looks at how extraction is enacted through three distinct practices: prospecting, enclosure and unbundling, studied through three different cases. The cases involve resources that are material and immaterial, renewable as well as non-renewable, "natural" as well as manmade. Prospecting is exemplified by patenting of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, enclosure is exemplified by debates over copyright expansionism and information commons, and unbundling through conflicts over mining and gas extraction. The article draws on fieldwork involving interviews and participant observation with protesters at contested mining sites in Australia and with digital rights activists from across the world who protest against how the expansion of copyright limits public access to culture and information. The article departs from an understanding of "commons" not as an open-access resource, but as a resource shared by a group of people, often subjected to particular social norms that regulate how it can be used. Enclosure and extraction are both social processes, dependent on recognising some and downplaying or misrecognising other social relations when it comes to resources and processes of property creation. These processes are always, regardless of the particular resources at stake, cultural in the sense that the uses of the commons are regulated through cultural norms and contracts, but also that they carry profound cultural and social meanings for those who use them. Finally, the commonalities and heterogeneities of these protest movements are analysed as 'working in common', where the resistance to extraction in itself represents a process of commoning.

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Planerna på en järnmalmsgruva i Kallak utanför Jokkmokk i Norrbottens län har mött stort motstånd, men har också ivriga förespråkare. Denna artikel analyserar de kontroversiella planerna genom att studera handläggningen av ansökan om bearbetningskoncession. Ärendet som har handlagts i flera omgångar och två gånger hänskjutits till regeringen för beslut. I skrivande stund, mer än sju år efter att ansökan gjordes, saknas ännu beslut i ärendet. Genom en diskussion av fallet Kallak vill jag belysa hur djupt politiska grundantaganden kommer in i förvaltningsprocessen och påverkar hur olika instanser agerar i ärendet. Artikeln bygger på en analys av material som har producerats och inkommit i processen i form av skrivelser och yttranden. Handläggningsprocessen visar att frågan om att bevilja en bearbetningskoncession är svåravgränsad och knuten till ett antal andra överlappande problemområden. Med den här artikeln vill jag bidra med förståelse för hur handläggningen i det här fallet inte alls är konsensusdriven, teknisk fråga, utan hur konflikter mellan olika preferenser, värden och världsbilder kommer till uttryck i beslutsprocessen.